Native Americans And The Legacy Of Harry S. Truman

xEditor’s Prefacetermination is remembered less than fondly, and I told Mike that a symposium on Truman’s Indian policy might not present the former president inthe best light. To his credit, Mike brushed off my concerns and suggestedthat the Truman presidency should be understood in its fullest sense and notreduced simply to hagiography. But even more, we agreed that a thoughtfulanalysis of Truman’s Indian policies might also offer new insights into thetotality of the Truman legacy.Native Americans and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman is one fruit ofthis endeavor. Happily, it corresponds in time with a reexamination of thatperiod, as Native and non-Native historians seek to understand termination more fully, as well as its relationships with the Indian New Deal andthe surge of Indian activism that followed. As such, this volume is theproduct of multiple associations and contributions, and there are debts tobe acknowledged.First, the symposium and this volume would have been impossibleabsent significant institutional support. The Harry S. Truman Library andMuseum, under the direction of Michael Devine, provided essential material, human, and moral support from its initial conceptualization in windyLaramie all the way to our gathering in balmy Key West, and beyond.I owe Mike Devine a tremendous debt of gratitude for offering me thisopportunity. The Harry S. Truman Little White House in Key West,Florida, provided not only a beautiful location for our gathering, but thevery real sense that Truman was watching and listening from one of hisfavorite places on this earth. This was due in no small part to the generousparticipation of Clifton Truman Daniel, who reminded us of his grandfather’s essential humanity even as we acknowledged some limitations to hisvision. I am especially grateful to Bob Wolz, director of the Truman LittleWhite House, for his careful attention to detail and determination to pulloff the gathering even in the aftermath of two destructive hurricanes. TheNewberry Library also stood behind this endeavor, lending its good nameto our efforts and reminding us that D’Arcy McNickle, namesake of thelibrary’s renowned center for the study of American Indian history, wasa key player in the drama that unfolded during Truman’s presidency. Asdirector of the McNickle Center, I appreciated the Newberry’s willingness to intertwine its own history with the events discussed during thesymposium.In those days, the Newberry’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for AmericanIndian History also housed the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’sAmerican Indian Studies Consortium. The CIC AIS was a visionary enterprise, dedicated toward nurturing scholarship and promoting the workof graduate students from thirteen institutions of higher learning located

Editor’s Prefaceacross the upper Midwest. CIC AIS supported this symposium and rightlyinterpreted it as an extension of its own mission. For that, I owe a debt ofgratitude to the CIC, liberal arts deans from Big Ten universities, and thefaculty and students of CIC AIS.These institutional associations were also responsible for a particularlygratifying aspect of the symposium not reflected in this volume. On theday preceding the formal presentations, CIC AIS, the Newberry, and theNational Archives and Records Administration (NARA) sponsored a workshop on “Emerging Research in the History of American Indian Policy.”This roundtable featured several graduate students associated with CICAIS who presented works in progress. But what made this gathering specialwas the participation of NARA archivists, who not only commented onscholarship but also extended our conversations toward the creative possibilities that inhere in conversations between archival professionals and academics. While academics and archivists (and librarians) certainly speak toone another, this gathering represented a unique opportunity for reciprocalexchanges between student and archivist, and in a public setting. All creditgoes to Scott Roley, then of the Truman Library, and McNickle Centerassistant director Laurie Arnold, who organized the event; to graduatestudents Kelly Branham, Joel Helfrich, Rachel Liebowitz, and MatthewMartinez; and to NARA respondents Jim McSeeny, Amy Williams, andScott Roley.NARA professionals from Kansas City to Independence to Key Westmanaged the many details attending to any such gathering and, as anyonewho has organized symposia knows, provided essential but sadly invisible service. My thanks to Kathy Cornelius, Judy Kreher, Scott Roley, andAmy Williams.The burden for producing this book fell to Truman State UniversityPress and the Truman Library. Here, it is my pleasure to acknowledgea special debt to Barbara Smith-Mandell, who kept us—really me—ontrack. Thanks as well to Ray Geselbracht, Nancy Rediger, Sam Rushay,and Randy Sewell. My apologies too as my own professional trajectory andshifting responsibilities caused this project to slip to the sidelines.At the Newberry, I am indebted to John Powell, photoduplicationsmanager, for permission to reprint images from that spectacular collection, to the peerless Ayer librarian John Aubrey for pointing me in productive directions, and to Jay Nelson for advance work in the archives andwith our contributors. In Tulsa, my thanks to Mike Juen who helped withproofreading and compiling author biographies.Charlie Campo, chief librarian of Bangor (Maine) Daily News facilitated permissions to reprint a photograph from their archives (thank youxi

xiiEditor’s PrefaceMicah Pawling for alerting me to that photograph). Patricia Barahona,assistant curator of archives at the Historical Museum of South Florida,responded quickly and generously to my request to reprint one of theirphotographs.Finally and most importantly a word to our contributors. We wereblessed with the presence of major scholars and activists, from a formersenator and assistant secretary of Indian affairs to some of the most important scholars in the various fields of American Indian studies. A particularappreciation to Tina Osceola (Seminole), executive director of the Ah-TahThi-Ki Museum, whose stirring address reminded all of us that successand Indianness are not contradictory concepts, Dexter Lethinen who filledin wonderfully when a health scare caused Buffalo Tiger (Miccosukee)to cancel his appearance, and Dave Devendorf, who shepherded SenatorCampbell to and from Key West. In all cases, I am flattered to know thatall of you were willing to take time from busy schedules to attend the symposium, to share your experiences and insights, and to bear with us as wemoved, ever so slowly, toward completion of this volume. A special note ofgratitude to Doug Miller, my student at UIC and now a PhD student atthe University of Oklahoma, who generously provided a paper on relocation on very short notice.In the end, this book is dedicated to our conference participants, andin the memory of William A. Hosmer, who loved history, enjoyed Truman,and would have reveled in this gathering.Tulsa, OklahomaOctober 2009

Harry Trumanand Native AmericansBrian HosmerThe passage of this act is an important milestone in our Government’sadministration of Indian affairs. It represents a carefully developed planfor dealing with the unsolved economic problems which have delayed thesocial advancement of this large segment of our Indian citizens. For theseIndian groups it also represents a significant forward step in self-government—a principle to which the American people are deeply devoted.1—Statement by President Harry S. Truman,on signing Bill for the Aid of the Navajoand Hopi Indian Tribes, April 19, 1950Termination is a bad word, a bad name, and an evil thought.2—Philleo Nash, advisor to President Truman,Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1961–65), 1983Harry Truman became president at a critical moment in the course ofAmerican Indian policy and affairs. Not that he necessarily knew it.Confronted with urgent matters of war and peace, fraying alliances, reconversion to a peacetime economy, a fragile political mandate and, later, challenges associated with civil rights, the Cold War, and implementing theFair Deal, Truman could be excused for devoting little attention to concerns outside his experiences and seemingly less urgent. Considering this,it may be useful to wonder if Truman had an Indian policy at all. DavidMcCullough’s magisterial biography of the thirty-third president implicitlyconfirms this assessment. Its index contains no entries for American Indian,Native American, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA),3 or its controversialxiii

xivBrian Hosmercommissioner, Dillon S. Myer. Conspicuously absent are references to suchsignature legislative accomplishments as the Indian Claims Commission Actand the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act, or even termination—that policyinitiative that so shaped Indian affairs from the Truman administrationinto the 1960s and indeed beyond. Given the broad reach of McCullough’sscholarship, these omissions tell us a great deal about the place of Nativeaffairs for Truman, and historians of his administration.4Several factors may account for these omissions. On the one handlies the historian’s understandable impulse to focus on monumental eventsthat have come to shape a consensus view of Truman’s presidency. Here,decisions to drop the atomic bomb, commit troops to Korea, stare downthe Soviets, initiate a national security apparatus, implement the MarshallPlan, and recognize the State of Israel conform to a narrative that placesTruman at the center of postwar international crises in the age of the ColdWar. Similarly, historians’ attention to Truman’s support for civil rights,his move to desegregate the armed forces, and his efforts to extend prosperity and social justice present Truman as a visionary in the domestic sphere.The buck famously stopped with Truman, whose steely resolve and straighttalk have captivated historians even if unappreciated at the time. In thiscontext, American Indians, “our First Americans” as Truman sometimesreferred to them, must appear as bit players in a consequential presidency.But there is more to this omission than first meets the eye. For themarginalization of Native historical experiences also owes at least as muchto habits and conventions that reflect and perpetuate the reduced placeof Indians in our national consciousness. Just as popular culture situatesIndians in predictable places (as objects of museum displays, in movies, or,more recently and perhaps uncomfortably, as operators of profitable casinos), history books include Natives in usual and accustomed locations: onbattlefields or as tragically doomed representatives of disappearing ways oflife. Stereotypes owe something to truth, of course, but inevitably carry aprice. If unnoticed at the time or unseen, as Frederick Hoxie argues in hisessay, American Indian history is less marginal than it is obscured by ourtendency to ignore indigenous peoples in telling and retelling Americanhistory. Separating Truman from Native Americans can be understoodas a function of the way we think about history, where Indian historyis somehow exotic—“other”—and removed from issues and events thatreally matter. Historical treatments of Indians replicate patterns that relegate Native people to the margins of American life, where Indian historyis seen as apart from, rather than a part of, national narratives that in thisinstance emphasize the Cold War and civil rights.5Contributors to this volume, which arose from the 2006 Harry S.

Harry Truman and Native AmericansTruman Legacy Symposium, argue otherwise. Hosted by the Harry S.Truman Little White House and co-sponsored by the Truman Library andMuseum, the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for AmericanIndian History, and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)American Indian Studies Consortium, “Harry Truman and NativeAmericans” brought together academics from various fields, activists andattorneys, politicians of national reputation, and representatives fromFlorida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Nations. All were asked to reflect uponIndian affairs during the Truman years, which they did. But quite on theirown, contributors considered legacies. Partly implicit in the title of thismeeting (it was one of a series of symposia, after all), this emphasis onseeking meaning beyond the Truman presidency testifies to outcomes andconsequences, and challenges us again to see the unseen and to understandlinkages between broader currents that shaped that presidency and theirresonance for Native communities, then and today. Barely a month before Truman assumed the presidency, John Collier, commissioner of Indian affairs throughout Franklin Roosevelt’s administration,resigned his post under pressure. Exhausted by scathing criticism for hispolicies supporting tribal self-government over forced assimilation, Collierexited the scene, and with that, the Indian “New Deal,” already sputtering under the weight of wartime priorities, effectively stalled. In its placecame a complex mix of initiatives identified in history as “termination.”Conventionally described according to three interlocking agendas—compensation, or a final settlement of outstanding tribal claims against the federal government; relocation, meaning programs designed to induce Indiansto abandon reservations for urban centers; and termination, code for the dismantling of the federal government’s trust relationship with (and supportfor) Native nations as distinct corporate entities with status supported by theU.S. Constitution and legal precedent—termination represented a return topolicies that promoted assimilation and constituted a thorough repudiationof Collierism.6Termination cut a wide swath across Indian country. By the end ofTruman’s administration, relocation was well underway, a deeply flawedclaims process anticipated a final resolution of tribal grievances, andCongress and the executive branch had pressed ahead with a controversial reclamation project that flooded fully one-third of the Fort BertholdReservation in North Dakota. The fate of Indian programs (much less theBIA itself) hung in the balance as administrators and observers eagerlyanticipated the eventual end of reservations. The pace of change onlyxv

xviBrian Hosmerincreased with the emergence of Republican rule. Under Eisenhower,Congress passed landmark legislation formalizing the government’s intentto terminate the special status of tribes (House Concurrent Resolution 108,1953) and announced its intention to shift jurisdiction over reservationcriminal and civil matters to states (Public Law 280, 1953). At virtuallythe same time, hastily convened congressional hearings produced legislation targeting Menominees and Klamaths, and singled out communitiesfrom New York, California, and Utah to Texas and Florida. Between 1954and the close of the 1960s when termination stalled (before being formallyrenounced in the early 1970s), more than one hundred tribes were officially“terminated,” directly affecting 11,000 people and more than 1.3 millionacres of land. At the same time, Congress and executive branch agenciespressed ahead with economic development plans that diminished Indiantrust land by 2.5 percent, cut off federal services for 3 percent of all federally recognized Indians, and left impoverished communities even less ableto sustain growing populations. Little by little, many thousands of Nativesabandoned home and community for uncertain futures in cities.7Ultimately, termination prompted reaction from non-Natives opposedto the dismantling of tribal culture, but more importantly from Nativeswho organized and lobbied for recognition of Native rights. In the end, thepoliticization of American Indians, first in opposition to termination andlater in support of self-determination and sovereignty, ranks among themost important legacies of the termination era. But still, as attorney andhistorian Charles Wilkinson (himself a player in the drive to reverse termination’s effects) wrote, “for Indian people, the word termination representsthe third rail, shorthand for all that is extreme and confiscatory in federalIndian policy.” All of this began under Truman, even if the president,more likely than not, never fully appreciated the potential magnitude ofthe political movement emerging out of a moral, ethical, and humanitarian crisis then taking shape.8From New Deal to Termination—and BackMost historians agree that some mixture of dissatisfaction with the IndianNew Deal, postwar cultural conformity and desires for national unity,anticommunism at home and abroad, and the increasingly visible, andintolerable, contradiction between America’s support for liberty abroadamidst racial segregation at home, undermined whatever support existedfor tribal self-government and cultural pluralism that existed during theCollier years. Many agree with Paul Rosier’s observation that critics of theIndian New Deal “fused nineteenth-century language of the allotment

Harry Truman and Native Americansera with the new language of World War II and of the emerging ColdWar—anticommunism, individualism, emancipation, and liberation.”9On the ground and at that historical moment, politicians and industrialistssought to exploit western resources, and criticized reservations as impediments to progress and prosperity. One letter to Wyoming’s U.S. SenatorJoseph O’Mahoney captured the views of many. “I am distressed whenI see great stretches of this land available for irrigation, uncultivated,”wrote Joseph B. Lutz, a federal probation officer assigned to that state.“Any plan,” he continued, “that will help to develop initiative and independence for the Indian and assist in the assimilation of these families into thegeneral American population, would be both wholesome and practical.”For good measure, Lutz also encapsulated some of the sentiment behindtermination, when he took pains to point out that “since there is little orno prejudices [sic] in this country against Indian blood there is no goodreason from my point of view why they should not be taken into our whitefamilies as wives and mothers.”10Others viewed federal protection for separate Indian communities as anexpensive anachronism that undermined the authority of states and counties, removed lands from tax rolls, and seemingly justified duplicative socialprograms. In this political environment, Collier’s efforts to support Indiancultural values, preserved and sustained on and through self-governing reservation communities, seemed un-American at best, dangerous at worst.Collier battled these forces all through the 1930s, and for a time succeededin protecting the Indian New Deal. But the criticism was damaging, particularly when congressional antagonists could draw upon Native activistslike Joseph Bruner, the Creek businessman and president of the right-wingAmerican Indian Federation, who accused the commissioner of forcingsocialist ideas upon an unsuspecting, and presumably easily duped, population.11 In one such letter, Bruner reported on congressional “hearings againstCollier and Collierism, which by the way is Communism and Atheism.” Inwords that fly off the page, Bruner announced that “We are opposed to theappropriation of so much as ONE PENNY out of the public treasury for thecarrying out of this COLLIER-COMMUNISTIC SCHEME.”12 Collierproved more than a match for Bruner, but support for his Indian NewDeal—communistic and atheistic or not—proved shallow. By 1943, withthe Office of Indian Affairs temporarily relocated to Chicago’s MerchandiseMart building, Oklahoma’s Senator Elmer Thomas announced his intention to abolish the Office of Indian Affairs, charging that Collier’s policies“promoted segregation, made the Indian a guinea pig for experimentation,tied him to the land in perpetuity, and made him satisfied with all the limitations of primitive life.” Collier and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickesxvii

ContributorsBen Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne), a former U.S. senator (1993–2005) from Colorado, was the first American Indian to servein the Senate in more than sixty years. A leader in public lands policy,he is recognized for the passage of landmark legislation to settle NativeAmerican water rights. He is also acknowledged for initiating and passing legislation to establish the National Museum of the American Indianwithin the Smithsonian Institution. In addition to his political life,Campbell is a self-employed jewelry designer, a rancher, and was a trainerof champion quarter hors

gratitude to the CIC, liberal arts deans from Big Ten universities, and the faculty and students of CIC AIS. These institutional associations were also responsible for a particularly gratifying aspect of the symposium not reflected in this volume. On the day preceding the formal presentations, CIC AIS, the Newberry, and the